The American Bird Conservancy (ABC) today put out this video of a wind turbine striking a bird. It's provocative, and bird lovers will cringe. But it clearly shows just exactly what the bird conservancy and other wildlife advocacy groups are talking about when they say wind farms are lethal for birds.

It's an increasingly important issue, one that pits altnernative energy against the preservation of wildlife Just yesterday Xcel Energy inc. was forced to cancel a $400 million wind farm in southeastern Norh Dakota that threatened to endangered species of birds -- the whooping crane and the piping plover.The federally required mitigation efforts created too much "uncertainty in the cost and timing," the company said.

The bird conservancy estimates that 440,000 birds are kileld each year by wind farms.There are now an estimated 400 whooping cranes in north American, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The piping plover is listed as endangered in the Great Lakes area, with only 63 known nesting pairs in 2008.

This video, provided by instantlyviral.com, was shot in Crete by an American tourist. It shows Griffon Vulture being struck by the blade of a wind turbine. The bird, according to the conservancy, suffered a broken wing and has been in rehab for a year. It's rare for a bird to survive such a collission, the
conservancy said, so they don't learn to avoid them. "There is no learning curve for birds," said Michael Parr, vice president of the bird conservancy.

"ABC supports wind power when it is bird-smart, and believes that birds and wind power can co-exist if the wind industry is held to mandatory standards that protect birds," said Parr.

That includes siting considerations, operational and construction mitigation, bird monitoring, and compensation to redress any unavoidable bird mortality and habitat loss, he said. Those are, no doubt, precisely the costs that Xcel said were probelmatic.